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Winged Wonders….

Butterflies are pretty cool and I remember learning about them at school when we were talking about life cycles of animals.

Butterflies mate and lay eggs, usually on a leaf somewhere. A caterpillar hatches from the egg and crawls around for a while eating and getting fat! After a while the caterpillar finds a good spot to hide and builds a cocoon. Because every type of butterfly is a little bit different…their caterpillars and cocoons look different too! After a long time, some take months, the cocoon breaks apart and the grown up moth or butterfly comes out. Their wings are flat and wet from being in the cocoon so long, so at first they look funny and wrinkled. But after a while, the blood starts pumping around the wings and they dry out and open and start to look like the beautiful creatures we are used to seeing in our gardens! Pretty amazing hey? Sometimes, I think about how it would be to have to go into a cocoon before I could grow up. How weird would that be?!